Teams trade paint, brushes for vinyl

This is the first of a two-part series on how car graphics are created through vinyl wrappers.

There was a time, not too long ago, where if you wanted to change the paint scheme on your NASCAR ride, you had to actually paint the car.

Bobby Moody, who was head of the paint and body shop at RCR, used to have to mask out letters and paint them individually. That took many hours to do, and if a car was wrecked, you had to do it all over again.

Through a combination of events, 3M invented a high-quality, durable vinyl wrapper that could be applied to a race car in a little more than two hours.

Vomela Specialty Company, which was founded in 1947 in St. Paul, Minn., produces the graphics for the wrappers, and a whole new high-tech age was ushered in.

Vomela, a privately held company and the largest graphics company in the U.S., has gotten into racing in a huge way since 2003, when it first formed a North Carolina regional office with the intent of getting into NASCAR.

In May, Vomela purchased Motorsports Designs, the leading company in NASCAR graphics, and last month, the company bought Frank Bolter's Corporate Image, the leading graphics company for the Busch Series and Craftsman Truck Series.

"Vomela likes to get into a business and dominate," said Michael Rompf, who headed up the company's first foray into the NASCAR market back in 2003. "In 2003, Vomela created a motorsports program. The graphics were being produced in Minnesota. They knew they had to have a production facility in North Carolina from the beginning, in order to produce a business the size that they wanted to have."

One of the ways Vomela grows is by strategic acquisition, such as with Motorsports Designs and Corporate Image. Part of that program is to leave the owner in place to run the business.

Motorsports Designs was founded in 1982 by John McKenzie, and his first customer was Childress, who fielded the No. 3 Piedmont Airlines car. McKenzie approached Childress with the idea of cutting out the letters and putting them on as a decal, and the rest, as they say, is history. Besides, Bobby Moody didn't have to mask out letters any more.

McKenzie's second customer was Richard Petty, and both those relationships are still in place today. So is McKenzie.

"One of the things Vomela does is look for successful companies, and once they acquire them, they let them continue to be successful," McKenzie said. "They let us do our thing. When we started talking, I did a lot of research on Vomela, and I talked to every one of the people whose businesses Vomela bought. If it hadn't been that way, I would never have sold to them or to anyone."

McKenzie is still hard at work in his High Point office, just as Frank Bolter is hard at work at the former Corporate Image offices in Concord.

"I've spent more time here in the offices since May than I did before," McKenzie joked. "We've got a lot of things going on. I'm looking at a lot of big-picture things."

"This combination makes a lot of sense for our customers," Bolter said. "The reputation of Motorsports Designs in the racing industry along with the expertise and resources of both Motorsports Designs and Vomela will allow us to better serve the racing community, its sponsors, and commercial customers."

By the end of 1982, McKenzie said Motorsports Designs handled decals for about 20 cars. By the end of 1984, Motorsports Designs had all but one of the Cup cars under wraps.

With the advent of RaceWraps technology, Motorsports Designs and Vomela have opened up a huge business that makes the lives of race teams much easier.

According to McKenzie, it takes a good team of applicators less than three hours to completely change a car's look.

"They've done it quicker, but with no problems, it takes just that long," he said. "You can apply these over primer, over paint, over another RaceWrap, or over paint and decals, then peel it off and change it for whatever you need."

How many of these RaceWraps does Motorsports Designs supply in a typical season?

"We supplied one team with more than 300 of them this season," McKenzie said. "It all depends on what is necessary."

While racing is responsible for about 70 percent of Motorsports Designs' business on an annual basis, the rest is accomplished through a variety of programs like commercial fleet and RV manufacturing.